Ellery Queen - The Origin of Evil

How could he run out?

At this point Ellery noticed that his glass was as empty as his typewriter.

He got up from the pony-skin chair and found himself face to face with a pretty girl.

As he jumped nudely for the bedroom doorway Ellery thought, The huarachos must look ridiculous. Then he thought, Why didn’t I put on those ten pounds Barney prescribed? Then he got angry and poked his head around the door to whine, “I told Mrs. Williams I wasn’t seeing anybody today, not even her. How did you get in?”

“Through the garden,” said the girl. “Climbed up from the road below. I tried not to trample your marigolds. I hope you don’t mind.”

“I do mind. Go away.”

“But I’ve got to see you.”

“Everybody’s got to see me. But I don’t have to see everybody. Especially when I look like this.”

“You are sort of pale, aren’t you? And your ribs stick out, Ellery.” She sounded like a debunked sister. Ellery suddenly remembered that in Hollywood dress is a matter of free enterprise. You could don a parka and drive a team of Siberian huskies from Schwab’s Drugstore at the foot of Laurel Canyon to NBC at Sunset and Vine and never turn a head. Fur stoles over slacks are acceptable if not de rigueur, the exposed navel is considered conservative, and at least one man dressed in nothing but Waikiki trunks may be found poking sullenly among the avocados at any vegetable stand. “You ought to put on some weight, Ellery. And get out in the sun.”

“Thank you,” Ellery heard himself saying.

His Garden of Eden costume meant absolutely nothing to her. And she was even prettier than he had thought. Hollywood prettiness, he thought sulkily; they all look alike. Probably Miss Universe of Pasadena. She was dressed in zebra-striped culottes and bolero over a bra-like doodad of bright green suede. Green open-toed sandals on her tiny feet. A matching suede jockey cap on her cinnamon hair. Skin toast-colored where it was showing, and no ribs. A small and slender number, but three-dimensional where it counted. About nineteen years old. For no reason at all she reminded him of Meg in Thorne Smith’s The Night Life of the Gods, and he pulled his head back and banged the door.

When he came out safe and suave in slacks, Shantung shirt, and burgundy corduroy jacket, she was curled up in his pony-skin chair smoking a cigaret.

“I’ve fixed your drink,” she said.

“Kind of you. I suppose that means I must ofter you one.” No point in being too friendly.

“Thanks. I don’t drink before five.” She was thinking of something else.

Ellery leaned against the picture window and looked down at her with hostility. “It’s not that I’m a prude, Miss―”

“Hill. Laurel Hill.”

“―Miss Laurel Hill, but when I receive strange young things au naturel in Hollywood I like to be sure no confederate with a camera and an offer to do business is skulking behind my drapes. Why do you think you have to see me?”

“Because the police are dummies.”

“Ah, the police. They won’t listen to you?”

“They listen, all right. But then they laugh. I don’t think there’s anything funny in a dead dog, do you?”

“In a what?”

“A dead dog.”

Ellery sighed, rolling the frosty glass along his brow. “Your pooch was poisoned, of course?”

“Guess again,” said the set-faced intruder. “He wasn’t my pooch, and I don’t know what caused his death. What’s more, dog-lover though I am, I don’t care a curse... They said it was somebody’s idea of a rib, and I know they’re talking through their big feet. I don’t know what it meant, but it was no rib.”

Ellery had set the glass down. She stared back. Finally he shook his head, smiling. “The tactics are primitive, Laurel. E for Effort. But no dice.”

“No tactics,” she said impatiently. “Let me tell you―”

“Who sent you to me?”

“Not a soul. You were all over the papers. It solved my problem.”

“It doesn’t solve mine, Laurel. My problem is to find the background of peaceful isolation which passeth the understanding of the mere, dear reader. I’m here to do a book, Laurel ― a poor thing in a state of arrested development, but writing is a habit writers get into and my time has come. So, you see, I can’t take any cases.”

“You won’t even listen.” Her mouth was in trouble. She got up and started across the room. He watched the brown flesh below the bolero. Not his type, but nice.

“Dogs die all the time,” Ellery said in a kindly voice.

“It wasn’t the dog, I tell you. It was the way it happened.” She did not turn at the front door.

“The way he died?” Sucker.

“The way we found him.” The girl suddenly leaned against the door, sidewise to him, staring down at her cigaret. “He was on our doorstep. Did you ever have a cat who insisted on leaving tidily dead mice on your mat to go with your breakfast eggs? He was a... gift.” She looked around for an ashtray, went over to the fireplace. “And it killed my father.”

A dead dog killing anybody struck Ellery as worth a tentative glance. And there was something about the girl ― a remote, hardened purpose ― that interested him.

“Sit down again.”

She betrayed herself by the quick way in which she came back to the pony-skin chair, by the way she folded her tense hands and waited.

“How exactly, Laurel, did a dead dog ‘kill’ your father?”

“It murdered him.”

He didn’t like the way she sat there. He said deliberately, “Don’t build it up for me. This isn’t a suspense program. A strange dead hound is left on your doorstep and your father dies. What’s the connection?”

“It frightened him to death!”

“And what did the death certificate say?” He now understood the official hilarity.

“Coronary something. I don’t care what it said. Getting the dog did it.

“Let’s go back.” Ellery offered her one of his cigarets, but she shook her head and took a pack of Dunhills from her green pouch bag. He held a match for her; the cigaret between her lips was shaking. “Your name is Laurel Hill. You had a father. Who was he? Where do you live? What did he do for a living? And so on.” She looked surprised, as if it had not occurred to her that such trivia could be of any interest to him. “I’m not necessarily taking it, Laurel. But I promise not to laugh.”

“Thank you... Leander Hill. Hill & Priam, Wholesale Jewelers.”

“Yes.” He had never heard of the firm. “Los Angeles?”

“The main office is here, though Dad and Roger have ― I mean had...” She laughed. “What tense do I use?... branch offices in New York, Amsterdam, South Africa.”

“Who is Roger?”

“Roger Priam. Dad’s partner. We live off Outpost, not far from here. Twelve acres of lopsided woods. Formal gardens, with mathematical eucalyptus and royal palms, and plenty of bougainvillea, bird-of-paradise, poinsettia ― all the stuff that curls up and dies at a touch of frost, which we get regularly every winter and which everybody says can’t possibly happen again, not in Southern California. But Dad liked it. Made him feel like a Caribbean pirate, he used to say. Three in help in the house, a gardener who comes in every day, and the Priams have the adjoining property.” From the carefully scrubbed way in which she produced the name Priam it might have been Hatfield. “Daddy had a bad heart, and we should have lived on level ground. But he liked hills and wouldn’t hear of moving.”

“Mother alive?” He knew she was not. Laurel had the motherless look. The self-made female. A man’s girl, and there were times when she would insist on being a man’s man. Not Miss Universe of Pasadena or anywhere else, he thought. He began to like her. “She isn’t?” he said, when Laurel was silent.